


Oceanographer's Choice

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Multi, a slim pretext for tentacle lesbians and twincest, eternal sadness of the post-sburb dersetwins, just kidding this is mostly angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-09-11
Updated: 2011-09-22
Packaged: 2017-10-23 15:51:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,248
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/252116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>What will I do when I don't have you to hold onto in the dark?</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. I don't mean it when I tell you that I don't love you any more

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to [Gatty](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Gatty) for her guidance and encouragement.

Rose is the first to admit that her predicament is, at best, unoriginal. To be an eccentric orphan in possession of a complicated past and a sizeable fortune is one thing. To spend one’s maternal wealth on an empty house, and resign oneself to a life of boredom, rain and shabby-chic upholstery is quite another. The cliche is as well-worn as the hinges of Rose’s antique drinks cabinet, and twice as tedious. Under different circumstances, she might consider it ironic. As things stand, whether sincere or not, the fact remains that here she is, in Cornwall, with boarded-up knick-knack shops on every side, and the grey Atlantic beating ceaselessly against the harbour wall.

It has been half a decade since her mother’s death. She has spent the intervening years with a number of distant Lalonde relatives, pleasant people who attributed her silence to grief and then to adolescence. Only one of these guardians, an uncle in Manhattan, ever saw Rose raised to any kind of passion. He had found a basket of sewing materials in a forgotten attic, and remembering that his niece had once entertained a fondness for needlework, he brought them down as a surprise gift. Rose thanked him and sat quietly unpacking the skeins and swatches. He stood in the doorway, almost touched by the domesticity of the scene. Then Rose looked up, with a look of crushing, chilling yearning, like a scarred veteran coming upon a childhood holiday snap, unable to comprehend the ocean of time which divided her from something long-since gone. Her skin flushed a deep steel-grey, the colour of asphalt washed with rain. All warmth seemed to have drained from the room, and he found himself unable or unwilling to move. Rose was a bubble of smoke in the shape of a girl, with darker tendrils moving behind her and under the surface of her skin. The worst part was that this happened silently, silently, and she turned to him as though nothing was wrong. Her face was fringed with feelers which bobbed like floating kelp. He felt suddenly very glad that her eyes and mouth were closed, but then she spoke sounds which were never meant for human tongues, and he bolted from the room. When he returned, with a Bible held in one unsteady hand and a broom in the other, Rose was both back to normal and perfectly composed. Still, he could not shake off the last image imprinted on his memory: ten slender slate-grey fingers, clasped in desperation around a ball of plain white yarn.

Now Rose is a free woman, with a house to herself in a faded British seaside resort, and nobody to see her when the throes become irresistible. That is, if she ever were to allow herself such lapses of self-indulgence, which she does not. Rose’s new house has the skin of an aged fisherman’s cottage, but the interior is all stripped pine, frosted glass, polished chrome, and paint shades which the catalogue calls “Clouded Magnolia” or “Pebble Mist”. There is a vast white refrigerator in the kitchen, whose pale angular bulk reminds Rose a little of the alchemiter every time she sees it. There is nothing inside but olives and white wine, on the grounds that if she is doomed to become her mother, she may as well accept the diagnosis with grace and dignity, barring the opportunity for euthanasia. Sometimes she considers climbing inside the fridge, curling up safely and closing the door, but the idea of being found weeks later as a crunchy icicle is mildly off-putting.

And so she spends her days in the salon, watching endless undistinguished panel-shows on TV. She doesn’t understand most of the jokes. This is what it must have been like for the various grief-counsellors and therapists she was compelled to visit.

“Rose, tell me about your mother,” they say.

“For an alcoholic, she was an adequate parent,” Rose says, “We had unfinished business. It’s difficult. Will that do?”

If they make the effort to pry any further, Rose tells them something resembling the truth (“My friends and I were the only survivors of the apocalypse. We brought you all back from the inky void of nothingness because we didn’t know how to live in any other world, and now we don’t know how to live in this one either”). Rose is quite aware of how melodramatically self-serving this sounds, and she hopes it will convince the counsellor that she is simply delusional. Most of the time, it works. She still hasn’t heard the real question, not from anyone.

“And who are you really waiting for, Miss Lalonde?”

If she could speak the answer, through the black sea-salt thorns that would sprout from her lips, it would be a four-letter word.

* * *

The days grow shorter and the sea grows rougher. The beaches of the peninsula, pebbly and exposed on a good day, now look positively desolate. Rose puts on her best brooding attire, fastening her coat with one of Mom’s pearl pins, and goes down to the promenade. On a summer day, when the sun burns upon the water like Cleopatra in her party dress, the place might bear some resemblance to the Land of Light and Rain. As it is, the Land of Gloom and Barnacles seems more appropriate. Back when they were still speaking on more than a monthly basis, John had taken to devising silly names for the places where she lived. Land of Attics and Cousins. Land of Flatscreens and Wax Fruit. Congratulations Rose! You have attained the God Tier as the Master of Moping!

John is at college now, majoring in architecture. Just in case, he says. In what case, Rose doesn’t ask. It keeps him busy, at least. If they are all destined to become their parents, she can imagine worse things for John than a peaceable suburban life, children, hats and baking. Jade considered going to college (in order to become a marine biologist, of all things) but she vanished a year ago, and Rose has no idea what became of her. It is a surprise, then, to see her standing at the end of the pier.

Rose considers it one of life’s more peculiar facts that Jade Harley never changes. On the surface, this is a ridiculous claim: of course she is taller than she was in 2009, and her hair is longer and wilder, and she has taken to wearing large home-made earrings. All this seems merely to accentuate what was always already there, which is that she still speaks with the exuberant volume of a girl most accustomed to communicating with her dog, and that she is the nearest thing to a living creature that Rose has seen in a long while.

“Good morning,” says Rose, aiming for quiet dignity but ending up somewhere around stilted inadequacy.

“Hi Rose!” says Jade, and throws her arms round her. Jade is absurdly tall and strong from working in the sun, and dresses like a blind, middle-aged zookeeper, but she still smells of something brightly-coloured and floral, as though she wears the scent from teen magazine samples. “What are you doing in England?”

Rose shrugs. “The Cornish coastline has its sandy, limpet-encrusted claws thoroughly embedded in my side. I am powerless to escape. The fact that any one of my erstwhile relatives would have to brave a long-haul flight and the tender ministrations of the TSA in order to reach me is merely an additional lure.”

Back up at the house, Jade is unable to stay still, shifting from side to side before getting up and wandering around, poking at the cabinets.

“I suppose you’ve been wondering where I’ve been,” she says, peering upside-down into Rose’s fish-tank, “I’m sorry if you were all worried! There aren’t any fish in here.”

“It’s for the ambience,” says Rose, “And I’m sure you can take care of yourself.”

“Thank you!” says Jade, “That’s exactly what I said to John.”

“Ah, you’ve been doing the rounds? May I ask what you’re up to?”

“The thing is, I’m still not sure if I should tell you,” says Jade, with a delightful attempt at an enigmatic eyebrow-wiggle.

“Well, you know my appreciation for shadowy mystic bullshit has only increased over the years,” she says, “But I don’t think you’re going to be able to top disappearing for a year. Perhaps if you pulled John Egbert out of a hat.”

“It’s not like that, silly,” says Jade, “I just don’t want to involve you in more worry! I know you have a hard time.”

“I am truly a sad, deprived creature,” says Rose, pouring herself another glass of wine, “However, while much of my time is spent navigating the complex and glittering social world of St-Crispin-on-the-Rocks, I am sure I can spare some of my precious time to listen to your problem.”

“Well, I didn’t understand most of that, but okay. It’s about dreams.”

“My goodness. I could never have predicted this. My amazement simply does not stop from getting larger.”

“And I could never have guessed you were going to be sarcastic about it! It’s nothing like that, you know I haven’t had dreams like that since, you know, ages ago.”

“That was a very charming euphemism you did there,” says Rose, “But please, tell me all about your dreams. That is, after all, what I’m here for.”

“I’m having the same dream as John,” she says, “Almost every night now, and it’s not a normal dream, it feels vivid, like you’re really there.”

Rose sits very still.

“Rose? Do you know what I’m talking about?” says Jade. Her eyes are wide behind her glasses, green and innocent as empty wine-bottles.

“Yes,” she says, “I know. You’ve been dreaming about Feferi.”

Rose can’t imagine years to come in which she isn’t reminded, like this, like a swift kick to the stomach, of the things they didn’t manage to save. The outrageous cruelty of the game has its way of rippling into the future, and to her mind it is compounded by the sheer gasping unfairness of it all. If she has to have dreams like this, the ones which leave her shaking and weeping into her bedclothes, her skin flashing dark and pale like a time-lapse record of the sky, if she has to see one of their lost friends clearer and brighter than anything in the real world, then it would have been a kindness on the part of the universe if it could have been Dave. It would have hurt more. She wouldn’t have minded.

She makes an excuse and busies herself with the glasses, rinsing and flipping them and leaving them in the sink, spattered with soap-bubbles. Under the water, her hands are dark, haloed by tentacles which writhe and squirm happily in the water. In the other room, she can hear Jade fiddling with her designer houseplants (all succulents, not much in need of care). She waits, breathes deeply, and lets the purple-bruise hue ebb back up her arms and into nothingness.

When she returns, Jade is reading a coffee-table book about zen-gardening.

“A classic of world literature,” says Rose.

“I think the words in this thing were made in a factory,” says Jade, “Like that time I tried to alchemise a book.”

“Ah, yes, _Harry Potter and the Conksuck Boots_. As I recall it was little more than 300 pages of poorly-punctuated wizard shoes.”

“I wish I still had that,” says Jade, “I think it was kind of cool!”

“Distressingly, my efforts to produce a new Lovecraft opus were rather more successful.”

“Rose, are we going to talk about Feferi or not?”

“Can I ask you what part of this whole set-up gives you the impression that I am a person who much enjoys discussing their private inner life?” says Rose, with an unemotional little snap. She wonders when she got so irritable. Poor Jade.

“You don’t enjoy anything!” says Jade, “You don’t even bother pretending any more! But I’m worried about you and John. I’m really worried about these dreams. I think it might be Horrorterror business.”

“We live in the real world now, Jade. Dreams don’t mean anything, magic isn’t real, childish things are firmly put away, the shoggoths are back in their boxes, _et cetera_.”

“What the hell is _wrong_ with you?” says Jade, with her hands on her hips and her teeth bared, “Something bad might really be happening, and you’re just going to give up? You’ve got this huge grudge against the world for no _reason_! You never talk to me or John! Do you think that’s what Dave would have-“

“You can go ahead and finish that sentence,” says Rose, “I’m sure it’s nothing I’ve thought about on a frequent basis, or anything.”

“He died for us!” she says, “He died for you.”

“If that were the case I could be angry with him,” says Rose, “Nobody wants to be left behind. But you know that isn’t what happened.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Rose,” says Jade, “One day you’ll realise that. But I can’t talk to you like this. I’m going out.”

Rose says nothing, and Jade leaves, in a swirl of canvas coat, indignation and cheap perfume. As the door shuts behind her, Rose gets to her feet, feeling the cold creep of the shadow across her face and limbs. For the first time in years, she lets it engulf her entirely, relishing the obliterating rush of power through her bones and veins. The Thorns of Oglogoth are still in a box in her wardrobe, little more than dead wood, but the electric crackle of magic that burns in Rose’s nose and mouth is absolutely real. She floats a few inches above the coffee table, her lower tentacles flickering across the polished wood, tasting the chemical surface and shifting restlessly on. Strange tides run through her, drawing her out of the house, and letting her drift up the road, her toes dangling above the withered sea-grass verge. In this state she can feel everything, every blade of grass and every bramble in the hedgerow, glowing with vivid, tangible brilliance. As she passes she holds out her hands, letting the thorns graze her palms, then crushes the life from them with a simple gesture. The blackberry bush in winter looks much the same alive as dead. It’s petty, and stupid, and Rose wonders whether her oath to break and beat the game wasn’t fulfilled long ago, but the plant is already dead, and will never swell with fruit again.

Jade finds her two hours later on the headland, lying face-down in a patch of heather, soaked with rain.

“Oh, here we go,” is all she says.

“ _Ir avn’ghachtls_.”

“I should have known it was something like this!” says Jade, apparently not at all concerned that her best friend has sprouted a thousand slim cnidarian feelers, which wander in the wind like stems of heather.

“ _Nh'fsh ia rl'yneth, psyriech. Bluh_.”

“I know. Come on! Let’s get you home.”


	2. The way the ceiling starts to swerve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jade and Rose sample the town's exciting nightlife, and discuss their strange dreams.

Rose has suffered numberless horrors in her short life, both in the vagaries of Skaia and the true depths to which the internet wizard fanfiction community can sink, but none of them is quite as paralysingly alarming as Jade’s face at this very moment.

“Run that one by me again, Harley,” she says.

“Let’s go out dancing!” says Jade.

“Yes, I was worried I’d heard you correctly.”

“Is that a no? It would be fun! Honestly, Rose, if you’re going to be a lady drunk you don’t have to be the classy kind all the time. Anyway I feel bad for getting upset with you earlier! We should go!”

“Jade, let us make a deal. If you can find a nightclub in St-Crispin-On-The-Rocks, I will gladly attend with you.”

There is no nightclub in St-Crispin-On-The-Rocks. There is, however, a pub with a beer-spattered dancefloor, advertising “Ladies Night”, which is full of teenagers only too glad to escape their families’ holiday houses. A mirrorball spins overhead and a lacklustre DJ with a Sweet Bro beard is rotating a five-year-old compilation CD. Still, there is a time in one’s life when one needs music that thunders through the floor and shakes the ribs, and if that music has to be Dance Ibiza 2008, then so be it.

* * *

The floor is tipping like the deck of a sinking ship, and on the other side of the dancefloor is a skinny pale boy about Rose’s age. He isn’t quite right - his nose isn’t turned up just so, and there is no asymmetrical splash of freckles across his cheeks, but he has a shock of white-blonde hair, and he applies such focus and determination to making his robot dance adequately insincere that for a moment she can’t breathe.

“Rose!” says Jade, “Are you all right? We should sit down.”

Rose hasn’t quite realised just how drunk she is until she ends up curled on a bench in the corner of the King’s Arms, her feet tucked up awkwardly under her skirt in an attempt to preserve her dignity, and her cheek pressed to Jade’s thigh. In the distance, a sea of hands drifts and flows.

“Aw, you look so cute and elegant,” says Jade, who smells of cider, “Look at you, you’re like a little sugar mouse, I could just eat you up.”

“Well, John told me you were a lady-killer,” says Rose, “But I didn’t know quite how smooth you were.” She shifts a little on the bench. She wishes she could just fall asleep in the comforting folds of Jade’s skirt, but there is a button pressing into her cheek and a chair-leg jabbing her in the calf.

“Don’t be silly, Rose! You’re practically my sister. That would be weird.”

Rose flushes a delicate pink, almost invisible in the disco lights.

“What?” says Jade, peering at her. Her hair is hanging in damp, wriggly coils over her face. Rose wants to sit up and brush the stray locks back out of her eyes, an impulse which she immediately attributes to a love of tidiness. “Rose?”

“You wanted to talk about Feferi,” says Rose, “I believe I am sufficiently inebriated.”

“I’m sorry about before,” says Jade, “I don’t know how much there is to say! I’ve been dreaming of her for years, that’s all. It’s not a big deal!”

“You forget who you’re talking to, Jade,” says Rose, “Although if you want to start a career in saying the opposite of what you mean, I’d be honoured to mentor you. You missed her, I take it?”

“Yeah,” says Jade, “I miss her a lot. I went away for a year because I thought it might help me stop seeing her, but it didn’t really work. And now you and John have got it too, and I think maybe it’s something bad.”

“Maybe you’re not having the same dreams as I am,” Rose mumbles into her leg.

In Rose’s dreams, the troll girl is naked, and her eyes are pure white, as though one could see through her eyelids into the blank page behind the universe. Her gills pulse purple, fanning and contracting in the warm water, and a fringe of purplish membrane blooms from her hipbones like a row of warm living petals. She moves through the water like a minnow, darting and turning, and then she looks at Rose.

“I don’t know,” says Jade, “She doesn’t talk to me. I just see her in the distance, all fuzzy. Maybe one day she’ll get nearer. She’s still really pretty and seems… friendly. I think it might be a trap.”

Feferi has a beautiful smile, a crescent of needly angler-fish teeth which nonetheless manages to convey genuine joy. Every time they kiss - once in every dream, every night - it sends a little puff of salt human blood to mingle with the blue-black sea.

“Maybe you’re right. Let’s just not think about it,” says Jade, shifting her weight uneasily. Rose takes the hint and sits up.

She has soft skin and vicious claws, and Rose is sometimes surprised to wake up to find her arms free of bloody scratch-marks. Waking up is the worst part of the dreams, the cruellest part of the prank, and the disappointment only gets worse every time.

“Jade,” she says, leaning on her friend’s shoulder and burying her face in her hair, whispering so low she’s almost sure Jade can’t hear. “I tend to forget that you lost things too. I wish raging against the dying of the light would do any fucking good whatsoever.”

Sometimes she wakes up both weeping and embarrassingly turned-on, which is something she will never tell anyone, ever. It’s not as though the kisses are meant for her, anyway.

“It’s like some part of me can’t accept that they’re gone,” says Jade, sniffling, “I just feel so useless and helpless and frustrated. We could have saved them. And instead we get a… a sexy ghost. That’s what we get.” She’s suspended in that cider-sodden half-state between crying and laughing, and though it is not a pretty sight Rose thinks it’s a good sign. It means she’s going to be okay.

“A sexy ghost,” says Rose.

“It’s annoying!” said Jade, “You would think it would be great to get to see her but it’s annoying! I just want a good night’s sleep. It’s like I’m back in the golden city and I can’t sleep when I’m asleep and I can’t sleep when I’m awake.”

“Clearly your moon was where the party was,” says Rose coolly, “Derse did not have any sexy ghosts.”

“Oh my god, Rose, stop trying to be so edgy,” says Jade, “Stop acting like you’re actually okay to talk about that stuff. My head hurts.”

“Apologies,” says Rose. Then, on impulse: “Feferi gave me a message for you.”

Jade looks up at her with her plastic schoolteacher glasses askew on her nose and her eyes sparking, brighter than the ersatz glitter of the mirror-ball. Rose leans in and kisses her on the mouth, scrunching her hands in the fabric of her skirt to keep balance.

This is her first kiss, or at least, the first not chiefly occupied by astral projections with too many teeth. It’s soft and close and for a moment feels absolutely right, in that she rather thinks she might be quite glad to kiss Jade any day of the week, if kissing didn’t mean more than softness and friendship. She breaks away, watching Jade carefully before realising she is being too earnest.

Mostly, Jade looks surprised. Rose has an inkling she has quite a lot of experience kissing girls, but clearly this is something new.

“Not my subtlest hour,” says Rose, hoping to god she hasn’t ruined everything.

“A message got through?” says Jade eventually, “But that’s amazing!”

“Yes, I was being completely serious about that,” says Rose, “Not merely an intermittently grimdark tentacle princess, I am now receiving messages from The Beyond.”

“Exactly!” says Jade, “That’s exactly it.” She gestures a little with her empty bottle. “You’re the Seer. And you’ve still got some of your powers and that’s why she can get through to you more than me. Maybe it’s not something dangerous after all!”

“I don’t know, it does sound horribly like a Weekly World News headline. Lesbian Aliens On The Astral Plane. But I suppose you could be right.”

Rose does not offer the alternative interpretation: maybe I’m sexually frustrated and had a number of formative realisations while watching The Little Mermaid.

“But you know what that means,” says Jade.

“That my fragile psyche has finally succumbed to…” Rose is too tipsy to complete the joke, and there are too many ways to finish that sentence anyway.

“No, silly. It means we can break through and get them back.”

* * *

By the time they get home, they seem to have devised an unspoken pact not to remember the kiss at all. Jade spends the whole walk talking very loudly about wormholes and tesseracts and Rose vaguely recollects that one of the rungs on Jade’s echeladder was _Warpspace Warlock_.

The worst thing is that she knows how it could be done. A little deftly applied magic and the binding of the universe would come away like a flicked bottle-cap. They taught her how to do it, back in the day, without thought for the effect such knowledge would have on a thirteen-year-old girl.

“Supposing I engage with this fantasy a moment for the sake of argument,” she says, interrupting Jade in a particularly rapturous cadence, “If it were possible to be the beam of light that might pierce the shell of mortality, what then?”  
“We bring everyone out and guide them home, of course!” says Jade, “Imagine having Feferi and Kanaya and Karkat back, even. And all the others. Maybe even…”

“Do you think it wise to get our hopes up?” says Rose, trying to suppress the sad little twist at the corner of her mouth. It’s too late, in any event.

“It’s better to be disappointed than not try at all, I think,” says Jade.

She has spent five years trying to keep down the welling tides of darkness. To deliberately channel that power seems irresponsible beyond belief. Still, would she risk a brief life as a fluttering oceanic shade to bring them back? Would she cheerfully carve into the flesh of the universe if it would call the spirit of Dave Strider back through the veil?

Of course she fucking would.


End file.
